Beauty and the Beast may be Agatha’s favourite movie right now – though I think she prefers the live action to the animated, but that’s okay. For these activities either will work.

It took me a bit more time than usual to get the post ready, mostly because there was serious, but fun, work involved in these activities!

The first two activities weren’t actually time intensive. I had us read a book for the first activity. If you follow along on youtube, you’ll know Ella loves to read, and Agatha’s not far behind her. Ryan read, several dozen, stories to Cordelia and Brom, Ryan and I even managed to read something for ourselves as well. Though I don’t think either of us finished a book in one day! lol

Imagination is so important to me. We imagined what type of item we’d become if we lived in the Beast’s enchanted castle. I’m not sure what everyone decided in the end, but it involved a lot of giggling and plenty of imagination!

Our third activity took a bit more planning and a lot more work, but the payoff was priceless!

The kiddos all became inventors tasked with creating something useful.

Ella took to pinterest and decided to make a solar oven. She wanted to make s’mores. We made the oven as directed at first, but we decided it took too long to cook, and even after 40 min the pan wasn’t even too hot to touch with bare hands. So we decided to amp it up a bit!

We added more insulation inside, and more foil aimed toward the plastic cover. She also decided to wrap the entire outside in black paper, but hasn’t actually done that yet. After adding more foil and insulation, she was much happier with the results! She also changed the container she used, from glass, to metal.

Brom and Cordelia created chocolate chip dispensers to help make s’mores. They used marble run pieces and held them over the marshmallows and let gravity do the rest. They were very happy with how their inventions worked!

Agatha wanted to work together with everyone else to make the s’mores as well. She decided to make a marshmallow dispenser. This took much longer than one day to make. She created it on her own, with only minor help from Ryan and I to problem solve or poke holes.

She started by finding a candy dispenser and looking to see how it worked. She noted there was a container on top to hold the candy, a gear inside to move the candy, and a chute for the candy to fall down and out.

She had a wheel for a toy paddle boat, she took parts of it and used it to create the mechanism that opens the door inside the machine. She attached an ice cream container and an inverted sour cream container together with he bottom cut off the sour cream container, and a trap door that opens upwards in the ice cream container. When she turns the handles on the outside of the sour cream container, the gear pushes the door opens and marshmallows fall out! Look at that joy!

After all the projects were finished being created they tried them out. The s’mores were good, but they much preferred the chocolate and marshmallows mixed together without the graham crackers. Ella then shook up some whipped cream to put on top their yummy confections.

I’d love to hear about any inventions your children make! Share links if you’ve blogged about them!